Update on Pale Male’s offspring in #CentralPark-The young hawk was located today and seems to be alert, more to come.
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Pale Male’s Babies in Peril
Historically we’ve been focused on the East Village Red-tailed Hawks, but the story unfolding in Central Park this past week, simultaneously unsettling and heartwarming, was something we could not ignore.
It started last Saturday, August 8th, when one of Pale Male’s offspring was discovered by hawk watcher Susan Gibson. It was in a tree looking quite ill: its eyes were half closed and it hadn’t moved for hours. Concerned, long time hawk watchers Jean Shum, Nabil Esphahani, and Ann Shanahan kept watch over the baby until nightfall.
By Sunday morning, the bird looked even more exhausted and Ranger Rob (who was off duty) was called in to attempt a rescue. Initially, the young hawk was too high in a tree to reach. Just as Rob approached, the hawk flew to an even higher window sill on The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There was no safe way to access it so the devoted rescuers had to do the hardest but most frequent activity when it comes to bird rescues…they had to wait. Luckily in this case, they didn’t wait long. Within an hour, the bird flew to the grass and Rob was able to safely catch it in a net.
Jean and Rob drove the hawk to WINORR, a wonderful wildlife rescue organization that has helped with countless rescue efforts in the past.
Although blood tests are inconclusive at this time, the hawk has been gaining strength and it is eating, which is a good sign. If When it recovers, it will be released where it was found in Central Park.
Injuries and illness are common for young Red-Tailed Hawks this time of year as their parents feed them less to encourage independence. As the young are left to their own devices, they hunt poorly (often catching slower and sicker animals) and explore on their own (often getting stuck in places they shouldn’t be).
On Tuesday, a second young hawk was spotted in a tree looking ill. It was still there on Wednesday when heartbreaking news came in: a third young hawk was found dead near 77th St. and East Drive. Within the span of 4 days, all three of Pale Male and Octavia’s 2015 offspring were in peril.
Again, a group of people watched the sick hawk until late Wednesday evening. By Thursday, the hawk still hadn’t moved and a rescue was in order. Here is where the story gets interesting on the human side of the equation. The hawk was sitting in a very dense tree, no ladder could reach it. Perhaps, with a cherry picker, a rescue would be possible. But who has one of those on hand? The NYC Department of Parks and Recreation (Parks Dept.) and the Central Park Conservancy (CPC) cut through the bureaucracy and BS one would expect in any large, human-run organization, and they got a CPC cherry picker to the scene quickly (so quickly, in fact, that I assumed I had an hour to get there to witness the rescue…how wrong I was, I ended up sprinting a mile to make it in time!).
With the cherry picker in position, Rob and the folks from the Parks Dept and CPC discussed the best approach to take. As you can see in the video below, the thick foliage made it tough…
…and the bird flew to a nearby tree. Because it still had the strength to fly, everyone decided to watch it for another day, and hope it would come down to a lower branch where it could be rescued. I spent time with the group who stayed there vigilantly watching the hawk for hours and hours. While I was there, the hawk was alert a handful of times…
But spent most of the day stagnantly resting in the tree, ignoring the world around it.
This is not normal behavior for a juvenile hawk at this age. They should be practicing hunting, flying around, and exploring their environment (as we saw recently with the young hawk at the NYC Marble Cemetery).
By Friday morning, the hawk still hadn’t moved and probably hadn’t eaten for days, so Ranger Rob, Kevin Sisco, and some helpful park visitors (aaahh, the kindness of strangers!) worked together to stand up a giant ladder.
But alas, good things are never easy, and the ladder was too precarious to climb. And so the team was back to square one…and the waiting ensued.
But this time, Caroline Greenleaf, who is the Director of Community Relations at Central Park, got the cherry picker to assist in a second rescue attempt. As you can see in this video (shot by Nabil Esphahani) Ranger Rob got part of the net onto the baby. It then ducked, stepped back, and again flew to a nearby tree.
It picked an even higher perch where a rescue wouldn’t be possible.
As of this morning, the hawk has moved from that perch and hawk watchers are searching for it. After so many hot days without eating, the bird is likely in worse shape.
We will continue to update you as this story unfolds. If you do spot the hawk in the park, please let us know ( twohawksnyc@gmail.com ) and we will put the word out.
Many thanks to Ranger Rob, CPC, Parks Dept., Caroline Greenleaf, and all the hawk lovers who have helped these hawks.
Red…I feel my soul on fire!
Black…my world if she’s not there…
– Red and Black, Les Miserables #LesMiz
Weeding is exhausting…
The Tenement Museum on Instagram: “Photo Courtesy of TwoHawksNYC. You never know what you are going to see on any given day in the Lower East Side. While walking past the…”
Excited to be mentioned by the best local museum! A must-see in NYC.
Old Cemetery, New Tricks
One of the best things about New York City is that every place you step has a rich and storied history. The East Village is rife with such tales and the New York City Marble Cemetery, where one of the young hawks recently spent an afternoon frolicking around, is no different.
At its heyday in the 1830s, the cemetery was a fashionable place to be buried. Underground marble vaults were thought to prevent the spread of yellow fever that had plagued the city since the 1790s. President James Monroe was buried there in 1831 (and later moved) and there is even a prominent shipping merchant buried there…his name is, we kid you not, Preserved Fish.
According to Ephemeral New York, in the 1890s, Jacob Riis wanted to turn a nearby marble cemetery (the New York Marble Cemetery, which was started by the same people) into a playground for street kids who had no other place to play. It didn’t happen quite how he intended, but a young hawk certainly had some fun there last week…
The young hawks are now 3 months old and they are learning to hunt. Their parents are still making sure they are well fed in the meantime. The cemetery is a perfect place for the hawk to practice: abundant squirrels and pigeons to go after and no people to get in the way!
And this hawk was all over the place! It was very inquisitive. Here it jumped on a bench…
And examined some greenery…
Here it is peeking behind a gravestone at a hidden squirrel…
“I’ll get you!!”
“Where’d you go?”
Later, it had a face off in a tree with a brazen squirrel…
Then the hawk lunged at it…
…but it was just posturing. Maybe practicing its menacing looks.
It spotted something on the ground…
…a squirrel out in the open…
…it dove after it!
…to no avail.
At one point, the hawk was on a fire escape at the back of the cemetery for a while and some of the animals became braver, coming closer to us to see if we were offering any food (we weren’t)…
Later the hawk was exploring the ivy-covered wall on the western edge of the cemetery…
…and a squirrel was on the corner of the fence in a conundrum: it was exposed with a peanut in its mouth.
So its options were to drop the nut and make a run for it or stay still and hope it wasn’t found out. It took option B and quietly cried in fear – but thankfully it wasn’t discovered as its cries were muted by the peanut (the same mechanics as a trumpet mute!).
While the hawk flew around a lot, even above the fence once, surprising the humans on the sidewalk nearby…
…the funniest moments were when the hawk was stalking prey on the ground. Here, the hawk sees something in the shrub…
After hours of exploration, the hawk flew up out of the cemetery and over 1st Avenue…
…circling higher and higher and eventually out of view into the summer sunset.
Es-Cape from the City
Each year, without fail, we “migrate” for a time to the open shores of Cape Cod to enjoy the weather, the sea air, and the joys of nature. Our temporary habitat of choice? Provincetown. The pilgrim’s real first landing spot in North America, Provincetown has always attracted free thinkers, nature lovers, and artists of every kind…including Tennessee Williams, Jackson Pollock, and Mary Oliver, just to name a few. And because of its location at the very tip of the Cape, it also attracts a bevy of gorgeous animals on the land and sea.
We build our annual nest at Surfside Hotel and Suites, on the east end of the main drag, Commercial Street. Suddenly our backyard is the beach where we peacefully watch the tides come and go.
We also see all kinds of wildlife from gulls who take to the sky in droves at dawn and dusk to hermit crabs jostling about at low tide. Here is a hermit crab who won the competition for a new big shell. Watch it jump from it’s old “house” to try out the new one.
We’re used to scanning the sky for soaring hawks and were delighted to see our first juvenile Bald Eagles…
…a gorgeous Common Eider (what a snout!)…
…teams of Semipalmated Sandpipers bouncing around and poking their beaks into the tidal flats…
…the occasional Semipalmated Plover would join them to see what all the fuss was about…
And we even saw an elegant Long-tailed Duck, who drifted along the water and dove for 30-45 seconds at a time (using the scientific 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi counting method).
On one of the days, we drove out to the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. The sanctuary is beautiful – offering everything from woods, to ponds, to marshes, to beaches. And, indeed, we saw all kinds of wildlife. Some of the highlights were a juvenile Great Blue Heron…
…a Snowy Egret…
…and hundreds of fiddler crabs who all have one small front claw and one GIANT front claw that makes you wonder how they can move around with an appendage that is the size of their body.
Amidst all the serenity, we did have one difficult experience. A Herring Gull drifted lazily up to the shore of the hotel beach. A brave woman, Diane (another animal lover from Manhattan!), gently scooped it up and we all set out to help it. We put the injured bird in a box and called Provincetown Animal Control and Wildcare Cape Cod, a rescue organization. Wildcare dispatched a hero named Swede (sp?) who came to pick up the bird and bring it to their treatment center. Unfortunately, it had multiple broken vertebrae due to blunt force trauma (meaning it hit something or something hit it at a very fast speed) and it couldn’t be saved. We were heartbroken but so grateful that people like Diane, Ruth Ann Cowing (Provincetown Animal Control officer), Swede and Wildcare Cape Cod are out there to give these animals a chance.
Despite that tough loss, something about the way the tides keep coming and going, the birds flying steadily and confidently, the clouds painting streaks in the sky…made us realize that things will be alright.
And the full horizon-to-horizon rainbow didn’t hurt either.
‘Cause I’m as free as a bird now,
And this bird you cannot change.
– Lynyrd Skynyrd
#freebird #tbt
Elemen-tree, my dear Watson
Since the young hawks have fledged, we’ve seen them hanging out on rooftops, fire escapes, and other structures around the church, usually at dawn and dusk. But there are days when the cross is empty and we don’t see any young hawk activity all day long…so a mystery presented itself: Where are they going?
“How often have I said that when you have excluded the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes (The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle)
After we ruled out the possibility that they were summering in the Hamptons with Leonardo DiCaprio or flying by Pluto with New Horizons, we started to hunt for clues that might help us.
The first real clue came at dawn one morning when we saw one of the birds fly towards a grove of trees near the church.
The hawk didn’t emerge so we began a long, pain-staking camera pan of the trees nearby. After almost giving up, like a 49er in the Truckee river, we struck gold! See if you can find the barred tail…
So…we knew at least one hawk was perched in a tree. Then, later that afternoon, the hawks were flying/crying around hoping for a feeding. One of them flew right into the trees…
…then flew right back out!
Aha! So we now we knew we should check that area more thoroughly. No luck for the first hour or so, until we happened upon the second fledgling perched in a low branch!
It seemed quite comfortable in the tree, conducting its own detective work on a tiny leaf.
A group of pigeons sat just under the tree totally unfazed…a hint that the young hawks still aren’t hunting yet. The fledgling took off soon after.
We found nothing the next day. And we searched a lot.
‘Come, Watson, come!’ he cried. ‘The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!’ – Sherlock Holmes (from The Adventure of the The Abbey Grange)
Not to be deterred, we continued the search the next day. And, this time, the good old-fashioned footwork paid off. We spotted another fledgling!
It was quietly perched in a tree…investigating the intricacies of a branch.
The young hawk sat there for at least an hour, totally unnoticed by humans and animals alike.
And finally, just yesterday morning in a different area on 3rd Street, we could hear the loud cries of a hungry young hawk. Sure enough, there we found one.
It cried and cried nonstop, attracting a small group of human observers. It moved in the tree a bit.
Mom was on the church with food and Dad arrived and started calling, perhaps hoping to lure the young hawk closer with some food.
The fledgling flew to a fire escape closer to the church and began a back and forth calling session with Christo that lasted a good 30 minutes.
The young hawk argued and argued…
…but Dad won out in the end. The young hawk flew to a nearby rooftop to await a feeding.
And so the search continues…but we are reasonably sure that if the hawks don’t make it to Tompkins Square Park, they’ll start practice-hunting a bit closer to home.
“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.” – Sherlock Holmes (The Red Circle by Arthur Conan Doyle)
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